I drove nearly a thousand miles last week to take my older son to Chicago, where I grew up, and where he’ll be spending the fall semester of his senior year of college. I thought there would be a chance for some father-son quality time over a couple of days in the car, time that was rare this summer, and that I sense will be far more rare in the future.

And we did have that quality time. These were vacation days well spent.

But I didn’t expect that just as meaningful would be a chance encounter with a piece of family history, one involving my father, who died seven years ago last month.

I had dropped my son off at a 10 a.m. orientation session, and headed for the Art Institute, the art museum that houses so many classic paintings. But to my surprise, when I got to the museum, its front steps were filled with people sitting and waiting for the doors to open; they would be closed for another 10 minutes.

I hate waiting around. And on a whim, I decided to see if I could find the building where my father worked for 26 years, from the late 1950s to the early 1980s.

THIS WAS THE huge downtown flagship of Goldblatt Bros., a 47-store Midwestern department-store chain that catered to immigrants and other value-conscious shoppers for more than six decades. My father was the accounting manager, and whenever my mother, my sister and I went downtown from our neighborhood on the city’s northwest side, we’d stop to visit him for a few minutes in his office on the 10th floor.

It was a busy place, a sea of accountants’ desks — this was in the very early days of computerization, and most of the work was still done with adding machines, primitive calculators that rat-a-tatted their answers onto spools of white paper. Dad had a small office with a metal desk, a big adding machine, a large window mostly shaded by Venetian blinds, and a few cartoons that had struck him as amusing. One showed an accountant talking to his boss, and my father had crossed out the name the artist had supplied; the caption now read, “How much profit would you like our ‘generally accepted accounting procedures’ to show this year, Mr. Goldblatt?”

Everything was painted industrial green, the color scheme for the store as well.

We’d take a look around the store below, too, and buy some candy or underwear, pants or shirts. I always felt a little out of place further north on State Street at the fancier Marshall Field’s and Carson Pirie Scott stores, and shopping at the nearby Sears or Montgomery Ward’s, fellow denizens of the lower-priced shopping world, seemed like treason. We were a Goldblatt’s family, and Goldblatt’s — with its timeworn fixtures and old, operator-run elevators — was home.

But times changed; a few years after I came to Rhode Island in 1978, Goldblatt’s went into bankruptcy, and my father moved on to other jobs. I’d heard the downtown store had since been turned into a library, and I thought I’d take a look.

I walked toward State Street, the “great street” celebrated in song, trying to remember exactly where the store was. The Loop streets that cross State are named after early American presidents. Was the store at the corner of State and Van Buren? State and Jackson? I couldn’t quite recall.

TURNING ONTO State, I saw at once the grand Harold Washington Library in front of me, a 10-story building designed in a bold style that married red brick with five-story-tall arched windows and wild roof ornamentation in green aluminum. An owl at one corner perched in metal foliage so sharp and overgrown, the whole effect was more like that of a dragon.

This didn’t look anything like Goldblatt’s. But I walked toward it.

And as I did, I couldn’t help noticing the building on my left, an even taller yellow terra-cotta structure with more modest decoration, a Barnes & Noble at one end, and a Thai restaurant inside. A sign said that this was the downtown campus of DePaul University. But it looked to me far more like my quarter-century-old memories than the exotic library across from it.

Could it be that this, not the fabulous library, had once been Goldblatt’s?

The DePaul building stretched an entire city block, and I looked at the street signs at either end: State and Van Buren; State and Jackson. Then I spied a brass plaque with its address written large: 333 South State Street.

Suddenly I remembered that address from my childhood, on receipts, on papers in my dad’s briefcase, and now just echoing in my head. I walked inside.

THREE-STORY-TALL columns stretched to the ceiling of the cavernous lobby, painted a handsome tan instead of the green I recalled. But color aside, they, too, looked right.

I found the college’s office, its rich woods far more lavish than anything in Goldblatt’s décor, and asked a woman sitting behind a large desk if I had found the right place. Yes, she said, I had.

I explained why I had come, surprised to find myself misting up as I spoke. And I asked what, these days, was on the store’s 10th floor.

It was the school’s library, she said.

I guessed, I said, that only DePaul students could go there. But no, she replied; while access to the library was restricted — you had to swipe your ID to get in — anyone could ride up to the 10th floor.

There was a large bank of elevators, all sleekly modern and automatic. I got in one and pressed 10.

THE 10TH FLOOR was dominated by glass; as you left the elevator and turned right, you could see the block-long library through a wall of windows, and on the other side of the rows of bookshelves you could see more windows looking out onto the city. I wondered which of them had been my father’s.

I noticed a student walking into the library, and he hadn’t had to swipe a card through the reader to do it. I decided to take a chance and go in myself.

Inside, I noticed more dark woods, computers, a hushed atmosphere so different from the active accounting floor I recalled.

I strolled to a window and looked out. On a building directly across the way, I saw a five-story-high sign announcing the John Marshall Law School. And with a rush, I remembered that you could see this very sign, for the same neighboring school, from my dad’s window all those years ago.

But the angle was not quite right, a little too oblique. I moved 50 feet or so to my left.

Now the sign was perfectly placed. This was the spot where I’d stood so often, visiting my father over the course of two decades.

I let the feeling wash over me, a feeling of closeness, a sense memory of times long gone. I remembered co-workers of my father’s, too, smiling people who’d treated me kindly.

For just a few moments, I traveled back to all of them.

Then I walked back out to the elevators, my head still filled with the wonderful surprise of it all, and pressed “down.”

arosenbe@projo.com